Edie Falco plays a brilliant emergency nurse with a pill habit and a second life, and she is reason enough to watch. The show around her is sharp for two seasons, then circles the same ground for several more before it remembers where it was going.
Nurse Jackie is a half-hour comedy about a drug addict who is extremely good at her job, and the joke and the point are the same thing. Created by Liz Brixius, Linda Wallem and Evan Dunsky, it ran seven seasons and 80 episodes from 8 June 2009, and for most of that length it is worth your evening, chiefly because of the woman at the centre of it. Edie Falco carries it. When the writing is good she makes it better, and when the writing goes round in circles, which it does for a couple of years in the middle, she keeps you in your seat anyway.
The first episode lays everything out without once asking us to approve. Jackie crushes a pill, snorts it, and goes to work. She has lunchtime sex with Eddie, who keeps her supplied, and then goes home to a husband and two daughters who think she is simply tired. We laughed at how briskly she gets through all of it, and then felt slightly ashamed of ourselves, which is the response the show is after and will keep after for seven years.
Falco plays Jackie with no appeal to the audience at all. She delivers a lie in the same flat, quick voice she uses to order a chest film, and she does not slow down for either. Her face does almost nothing when she takes the pills and almost nothing when she saves a life, so we are left to work out which of those is the real Jackie, and the show is honest enough never to tell us. It is a performance built from efficiency, and the cruelty of it is that efficiency is exactly what an addict needs most.
The hospital around her is well stocked. Merritt Wever’s Zoey, the student nurse who talks when she should listen and wears scrubs printed with cartoons, is the funniest person in the building and slowly becomes its conscience; Wever plays her as a puppy with a spine. Eve Best’s O’Hara is English, expensive and bored, drinks at lunch and treats Jackie as the only other adult in Manhattan, and the two of them have the show’s best scenes. Peter Facinelli’s Dr Cooper grabs a breast when he is nervous, which in the first episode is the whole character; the writers give him more later. Anna Deavere Smith’s Akalitus is introduced as a bureaucrat to be outwitted and is gradually allowed to be right. Haaz Sleiman’s Mo-Mo and Stephen Wallem’s Thor fill out a nursing station that feels like a place people have worked for years.
The directors, who over the run include Steve Buscemi, Paul Feig, Allen Coulter, Bob Balaban and John Cameron Mitchell, keep to one rule: stay on Falco. A scene ends on her face as the lie lands and the next begins with her already moving to the next bed, no pause, no music telling us how to feel. The half-hour form helps. Nothing is allowed to swell. A patient dies, Jackie takes a pill, Zoey says something ridiculous, and the episode is over before anyone has had time to make a speech.
The trouble is the middle. From roughly the third season the show settles into a loop: Jackie uses, Jackie lies, Jackie is nearly caught, Jackie is not. The supporting cast keep it watchable, and Ruby Jerins, as the daughter who has inherited her mother’s nerves without the pills to manage them, is quietly very good at it. But somewhere in the third year we noticed we wanted someone to catch her, and not out of concern for her health. We wanted the plot to move. The fourth season begins to make it move, in ways we will not describe, and the show is better for it.
Most critics land in the same place we do, warm about Falco and tired by the repetition, and we have no quarrel with them. Set against the cable dramas about charming men who do terrible things, this is the rare one that refuses to make its monster lovable, and it refuses for 80 episodes. Watch the first two seasons and you will know by the end of them whether you want the rest. It carries a 15, and it earns it in the first ten minutes.
